Problematizing The Deficit Discourses Of People With Autism And Autism Parents: A Poststructural Analysis Of Subjectivity And Power/Knowledge

An interweaving of analysis and personal narrative, this postqualitative inquiry uses Foucauldian concepts of power/knowledge and subjectivity as method. Both medical and educational discourses of autism are problematized for their focus on disability as a deficit in comparison to normative standards whereby people with autism and their families are positioned as being in need of repair. Discourse analysis reveals the relations of power/knowledge and subjectivity for people with autism and their parents before, during, and after receiving an autism diagnosis in early childhood based on a chronological retelling of the author's experiences with her son. Key themes that emerge from the analysis are the relations of power based on surveillance, counting, and control; the production of docile bodies and productive citizens; the privileging and measurement of certain types of knowledge; and the limiting of subjectivities as embodiments of compliance or resistance. Interludes offer space for thinking with affirmative difference and reimagining knowledge and learning with autistic perception in mind. Possibilities are opened for educational leaders and the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) process to foster spaces, interactions, and processes from a mindset of affirmative difference rather than one of reducing or eliminating abnormalities.